Dark Stories

I was following one of the Australian Agile conferences on Twitter recently and someone posted something about a talk on “Black Stories”. The click-trail eventually led me to this link and I decided that the card game sounded quite appealing (regardless of whether it would prove to be useful as a tool or not). A search for “Black Stories” for sale to South Africans almost ended in vain, but thankfully I decided to submit a query to http://www.timelessboardgames.co.za/ and they got back to me almost immediately to say that they had a set of “Dark Stories” in stock. A quick Google confirmed that this was the equivalent thing and, seeing as it was a Friday afternoon and I was in the mood for shopping, I ordered a box, which arrived the following week.

Since then, I’ve played a couple of games with my team. Our organisation has a horrid culture of people being late for meetings (generally five minutes; when I’m planning a session I always plan for at least 10 minutes) so having something for us to do while people dribbled in seemed a great idea. And, if it encouraged people to get there on time, even better! At first, people didn’t really figure out what was going on (I only play one card per session and we time-box it to 10 minutes, so sometimes people arrive after we’re done) but they’re slowly getting the hang of it and I have noticed that the percentage of on-time arrivals is increasing. I also like that it encourages some lateral thinking, which is also something we don’t practice very often in our day-to-day, so hopefully it will stimulate some more creative problem-solving too.

So far, I haven’t managed to take my box home yet to play it in my personal capacity, but that’s OK. A chance to make meetings more fun is far more valuable. If you’ve been struggling with this or getting people to rooms on time, I’d really give this a try. Do you have any other easy tricks or tools you’ve used in the past to set a good tone for a meeting or encourage other helpful behaviours?